Chapter 163
Seventy islanders from the uncounted island sit in the barley, wrapped in the Marka's blankets, dazed, eating bread. None of them can say where they're from. Mingus moves among them like a nurse.
in a corner of the acre, marking out a square of barley with string.
She takes a stub of charcoal-green ink and a reed pen, and on the inside of her wrist, between the emerald stalks, she writes one word in a different ink, darker, deliberate: FJÄLLMÅ. It glows faintly, then settles. A place, not a person.
watching from the farmhouse step, a hand over her heart.
three of them on the stubble, one standing up into Kali (one forearm a scarred stump, the other hand holding a fistful of barley) and the third rumbling with Bakasura's jaws.
suddenly on his feet, hackles up, facing the grey water. A low growl.
Out of the paper-grey haze comes the Gleaner fleet, slow and heavy, every barge sunk low in the water with salvage from the uncounted island: a church bell lashed on a deck, a whole mill-wheel, cart-loads of hillside stones, beams, doors, a weathervane. All of it grey. Colourless. Softening at the edges. Dying.
and at its bow, small, Mother Skrap stands for the first time.
MOTHER SKRAP · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #2,600 · Queen of the Gleaners
She is tiny. A bird-thin old woman, bent like a question mark. Behind her trails a coat sewn from a hundred flags, faded to a hundred greys, dragging along the deck like a bridal train. Her hair is grey rope, wound up and stuck through with a church weathervane, a copper rooster, for a crown. Round her neck hang house-keys on strings, dozens of them, to doors that no longer exist. Rings on every finger, none of them hers. One eye milky. The other bright and hungry as a gull's.
looking at Öde across the water. She smiles. It's almost tender.
scythe already in her hands, grass bursting up around her boots.
stepping in front of Öde, crackling green.
Vigolas leaps the gap and punches her: full lightning, straight into a bird-thin old woman.
She takes it. She flies back across her own deck and into the salvage pile. Gleaners gasp.
landing, already wincing.
Mother Skrap's ringed hand rises out of the grey wreckage and closes on the church bell. Then her other hand on the mill-wheel. Her coat-tails spread across the hillside stones.
flickering. A last faint flush of colour goes through the bell, the mill, the stones, like a last breath. And it flows up her arms into her.
Mother Skrap rises out of the wreckage, and she is enormous: four times the height of a man, built out of what she's wearing. A whole church bell rings in the cage of her ribs. The mill-wheel turns on her back like a great slow heart. The hillside stones have locked over her arms and shoulders as armour. Her coat of a hundred grey flags billows behind her like a storm cloud. The copper rooster on her head creaks round in a wind that isn't there.
Below her, tiny on the barley, the crew, and Vigolas looking up, and up, and up.
She steps off the barge onto the acre's edge, and the whole field tilts. She swings an arm with the weight of a hill behind it. Vigolas blocks with both fists crossed, and the blow drives him knee-deep into the soil.
Smurjan, the Triple Pulse: three strikes in one beat, bell, wheel, knee. The bell in her ribs booms, and the sound alone throws Smurjan across the field.
Behind her, a Gleaner barge Smurjan cracked earlier lists and sinks, its mast toppling. Mother Skrap reaches back without looking and catches the falling mast, and the sinking barge's last fury flows up her arm like heat. She whips the mast round with the full momentum of its fall and sweeps Kompis and Rougeina off their feet.
on his back in the barley, eyes gold, looking up at her.
A Gleaner hook-chain whips round Öde's ankle and drags her toward the grey water. She's alone at the rim.
Öde, falling, eyes shut, remembering one person so hard:
For one heartbeat, out of thin air beside her, Farmor Sigrun is there: an old woman in an apron, swinging her own scythe in one perfect stroke. The chain parts. Then she is gone, as if she'd never been. One heartbeat, exactly.
scrambling up, panting, and for a moment her face goes blank and lost.
(She shakes it off, and grips the scythe.)
half-awake on the farmhouse roof, watching that, very grim.
Vigolas hauls himself out of the soil. The crew regroups around Öde, bruised and furious. Mother Skrap looms over them all, bell humming in her chest.
And she sits down. On the edge of the field, enormous, like an old woman on a doorstep. She arranges her coat. She's in no hurry at all.
leaning down to Vigolas, the bright gull-eye very close.
unsettled for the first time in the arc.
lifting one ringed finger, as gently as someone asking for tea.
From every barge round the acre, Gleaners hurl torches, dozens of them, arcing through the grey air like falling stars, into the dry golden barley. Flames leap up in a ring round the farmhouse, round the seventy islanders, round the crew, and round a girl with a scythe in the middle of her grandmother's field.
The last field burns.